Fieldwork in Palestine and Israel - Claudine Dauphin 1999

Short season of excavations in the Southern Bethesda Pool (Probatica) where Jesus cured the paralytic (John 5), in the grounds of the French Territory of Sainte-Anne (White Fathers), in the Old City of Jerusalem. On the basis of ceramological and numismatic evidence, the final use of the Pool has been dated to the Umayyad period (ca. AD 750) and its first filling-in to the Abbassid period (ninth century), making use of seventh-century Byzantine building materials -- perhaps leftovers of the reconstruction work attributed to Patriarch Modestus after the Persian invasion of AD 614.

In October-December 1999, final season of upkeep and preparations for the opening to the public of the site of the Byzantine episcopal basilica at Dor (Israel) with funding from the Russell Trust, Scotland, the Katharine and Leonard Woolley Fund of Somerville College, Oxford, and Mrs B.D. Craig, former Principal of Somerville College. At the eastern entrance of the site, a board now provides a full explanation (illustrated by maps) in Hebrew, Arabic, English and French of the history of the site from an Archaic Greek temple of Apollo (seventh century BC) and Classical period (fifth century BC) to a late Roman healing sanctuary of Asclepius, to a Constantinian five-aisled basilica which was founded ca. AD 340 and possessed both a reliquary column incorporating a stone fragment from the Golgotha and the reliquary tomb of two healing saints buried together. The ecclesiastical complex was destroyed in a fire in the late seventh century and a factory for the production of raw glass was installed at its western end in the Late Byzantine/Early Umayyad period. Between the Ottoman sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries, the site was re-used as the Moslem cemetery of the neighbouring Arab village of Tantourah. The drystone retaining-wall which was built in 1994 and limits the excavated area to the north and west was extended westwards in order to encompass the excavation dumps whilst creating a viewing platform approached by steps from the north-east and supplied with an explanatory board which includes a numbered plan of the church with captions in English, French, Hebrew and Arabic. The site may be visited by arrangement with the Secretariat of Kibbutz Nahsholim (10 km north of Caesarea Maritima) and the Kibbutz’s Hamisgaga Museum where the reliquary column and an ivory episcopal sceptre found in the excavations are exhibited.